I have many stories about this particular Chairman of a company I used to work for, but this is my favorite.

The Chairman hired two assistants to run his office. The woman was "Kate" and the young man was "Alan," but the Chairman called him "Seven". For days Alan endured the Chairman calling them into the office by yelling down the hall, "Sue! Seven!"

Finally, Alan asked, "Why do you call me Seven?" The Chairman replied that he was the seventh assistant hired that month.

I was once manager of production, responsible for about 45 people. One day, early in the morning, the owner stopped by my office and informed me that we had just lost our major contract. As a result, we soon wouldn't have enough work to keep people employed.

When I enquired which one of us should tell the staff this, he instructed me not to inform anyone. Instead, I was to "find any reason to terminate employees.” For example, if someone was a few minutes late to work, I should immediately terminate them. He said, "If that doesn't work... give them tasks that will make them want to quit."

I argued against this but the owner threatened to fire me. It was tough times in manufacturing and I needed the job.

Over the next four months I had to personally lay off 85% of our employees. Then they fired me.
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My family runs a small tractor and power equipment dealership. We are faced with dealing with the power of a world-wide tractor company. We have to follow all their little rules. They instituted a new program for certification for all their dealerships and I was in charge of taking pictures of the shop and the employees and filling out a bunch of "self test" questions in their nice three ring binder they sent us.

I was still in college at the time so I worked on this through my Christmas break knowing that it had to be in by the first of the year and that our warranty and parts reimbursements would be completely based on our self test certification. I was probably the first dealer in America to get all materials in and was so proud of my work.

8 months later the company starts giving my Grandfather a fit about not being certified. All eyes now stare at me. Long story short, the notebook sat on a service reps desk for 8 months untouched and we had been getting shorter margins all year on work we had done for the company. My Grandfather rode two hours into the big city where the company was. He went through the cubicle farms and brought as many people as he could into their giant meeting room with a table and chairs that were probably worth more than our houses. They, of course, started in with the "we're sorry" treatment when he hushed them quickly and said, "Look, it's not the priciple of the thing, IT'S THE MONEY!" We were completely compensated.
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I used to work a grocery store which was governed by a woman I would be accurate in describing as a "bean counter".

One day I called in sick, which I was, and this very lovely woman called me a liar and hung up on me. This infuriated me to the point that I called right back with every intention to resign my post but to frustrate me even more she put me on hold for ten minutes. Now, this may have been a good thing since I realized while I waited that quitting my job would hurt me a lot more than it would her. So I decided to resort to using some civilized verbal abuse (and it was indeed civilized, some words that were in my head did not escape through my mouth) and expressed my discontent with her attitude towards me as an employee. The conversation ended amicably with us coming to a common understanding. Or so I thought.

The next time I came into work I was summoned to her office. Once I got there I received no eye contact from her (her attempt to dominate the situation) and in front of her was my punch clock printout, with every day where I was even just one minute late highlighted. In this group of days being late my average was about three minutes past the hour - and this is in Iceland, where if you're ten minutes late, you're on time (in Mexico I'd have been there before she was). Still she gave me a long lecture on what a bad employee I was - this coming from the only boss I've had who hasn't given me outstanding recommendations - while my department head stood by almost burying his face in his hands. I countered with the argument that I made up for it by never taking a cigarette break, since I don't smoke, and her reply was... that nobody in the company smoked. Which was an insane lie (or delusions of some kind) since more than half of the staff were smokers at that time.

It's safe to say that I lost that battle unfairly but was redeemed when this very lovely woman got fired for being an uptight *enter civilized verbal abuse*.
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